??Design and
Implementation of a Field Study of Durable Products and Recyclables Discards

in
New York City and New Jersey

Marjorie J. Clarke, Ph.D.

Instructor, RutgersUniversity Geography Dept.

Abstract

New York
City's residential recycling rate, after 10 years of
pilot studies and full-scale collections citywide, is 20% despite the existence
of Local Law 19 of 1989, requiring a 25% diversion rate by 1994.† Materials Recovery Facilities that handle
NYC's waste stream estimate that one-third of recyclables collected is
contaminated (i.e., garbage), so the actual diversion rate is more like
14%.† The City is targeting roughly 50%
of the waste stream as recyclables, hence there may be recyclables representing
more than 30% of the waste stream that are disposed of as garbage. Enforcement
of the local law mandating recycling has been primarily to fine landlords and
homeowners for (1) not recycling at all, and (2) not displaying proper signage
in apartment buildings.† Due to an
agreement between the City and the real estate interests in the City
Administration, made at the time Local Law 19 was enacted, enforcement
officials were prevented from opening garbage bags and cans to look for
recyclables.

At the same time, durable
products (e.g., electronics, appliances, furniture), some of which are usable
with little repair) are left at curbside as trash.† Though some of these durables are scavenged
before collection, many are not.

To address the need for
information on the disposal of recyclables and durables as trash, a three-week
field survey of garbage left at curbside in New York City
was conducted to quantify

1.the extent to which recyclable glass was left in
garbage bags and cans

2.numbers, types and general condition of durable
products left at curbside for collection as garbage.

This paper will present data
collected during this study, and using GIS, conclusions will be drawn regarding
variation based on location and demographics of neighborhood.

Introduction

Municipal recycling and
waste prevention programs have been maturing across the country for the last
decade.† Recycling programs have expanded
in some areas to include more than just the basic newspapers, cans and bottles.† There are unique characteristics of New
York City that differentiate its recycling
program from many others in the country.†
For one, roughly half of the housing stock consists of multi-family
dwellings, as compared with most municipalities, where the preponderance of
housing is single-family detached.† This
fact, and the great diversity of housing design meant that educational
brochures were† necessarily vague about
the location of recycling stations in apartment buildings, which posed
challenges in educating the public regarding the recycling program.† The ethnic diversity of the population is
also considerably greater than for most municipalities, requiring recycling
education to be conducted in several languages (and in a city with many
competing needs for City budget dollars, the resources for this necessarily
came out of other recycling education efforts).†
New York City's solid
waste contains much less yard waste (3%) vs. close to 20% in other
municipalities, so collection of yard waste for composting does not occur and
this adversely affects the recycling rate.

Even though there are
unique challenges involved with implementing recycling in New
York City, there are some characteristics
of the program that could serve to bolster diversion rates.† In 1996 the City decided to expand the list
of materials that are collected for curbside recycling.† As of 1999 the citywide program collects
newspapers, telephone books, magazines and catalogs, corrugated and grey
cardboard, mixed paper (junk mail), plastic bottles and jugs, wax paper cartons,
glass containers, metal containers and bulk metal items (e.g., toasters, frying
pans and cutlery).† This expanded list
targets a considerably higher percentage of the total waste stream for
recycling than is the case in other municipalities increasing the ultimate
potential for diversion.† Enactment of a
Local Law to require that all recycling pickups occur on a† weekly basis citywide by April, 2000 puts New
York City ahead of some municipalities
that pick up recyclables once every other week.†
The fact that a significant proportion of the City's population takes
mass transit subways and/or buses on a daily basis increases the potential for
a transit-based recycling education program to reach more people more often for
reduced cost.

Diversion rates have risen
from just a few percent to 27% nationally [1]
during the 1990s, but in New York City, the
curbside recycling rate is about 19%.†
There has been great impetus for the City to increase its recycling rate
since the beginning of its recycling program.†
Local Law 19 of 1989 mandated a 25% diversion rate be achieved by 1994,
increasing by 5% per year up to that point.†
New YorkState's Solid
Waste Management Act of 1988 set a statewide recycling goal of 40 to 42% for
1997.† By 1990 five borough-wide
Citizens' Solid Waste Advisory Boards (SWABs) and one Citywide Recycling
Advisory Board (CRAB) had been established, all of which have argued for
policies, programs, budgets, plans, and research to improve the City's
recycling rate. During the 1990s a coalition of environmental groups including
the CRAB and the Natural Resources Defense Council, City Councilmembers and
citizens brought suit to force the City to achieve the legally mandated 25%
recycling rate.

There has been an even
larger impetus reducing the City's ability to recycle. Recycling in New
York City has suffered from Mayors that
consider it to be a low funding priority.†
The Administration fought and lost the legal action to enforce Local Law
19 seven times in state courts, the only remedies involving new deadlines for
compliance.† Attempts to influence the
City Council to weaken Local Law 19, failed.†
At the same time, the City has been chronically under economic stress,
and there are many competing interests for City budget dollars.† In 1991 the City nearly cancelled the
recycling program altogether due to budget constraints.† Each year since then the Administration would
cut funding from the recycling and prevention programs, and the City Council
would have to allocate funding from other sources to cover the shortfall.† Later in the 1980s and early in the 1990s,
the Administration gave recycling and prevention lowest priority for new
programs as it favored the construction of as many as five waste-to-energy
facilities, one per borough.† The City's
recycling efforts were also hampered by the decision to continue sending out an
additional layer of recycling packer trucks on inflexible routes rather than
extending the routes and optimizing the system by substituting recycling runs
for garbage runs as the recycling diversion increased.†† This made the recycling program cost as much
as $300 per ton in the mid-1990s.

Another development that
put recycling on the back burner in terms of solid waste policy focus was the
decision by the current Administration in 1996 to close the Fresh Kills
Landfill, which had received 85% of the residential and institutional waste
stream at that time.† The post-decision
planning for alternative means of waste management, has focused the effort and
funding almost exclusively on exporting all solid waste that is not collected
for recycling, not on how prevention, recycling, and composting might be
maximized.†

Perhaps one of the most
important factors limiting the ability of the City to achieve higher recycling
rates, particularly in the large multi-family residential sector, was an
agreement forged between the Administration and the real estate interests in
the City at the start of the recycling program.†
This agreement, in effect, abrogated the enforcement provisions of Local
Law 19 such that apartment building owners would not be held accountable for
the lack of recycling by tenants.† Since
then the recycling enforcement in apartment buildings only involved questions
of signage, or lack of recycling at all.†
But the main enforcement problem in apartment buildings is now the
disposal of targeted recyclables in black garbage bags that enforcement
personnel refuse to examine.† Assuming
that 50-60% of the waste stream consists of recyclables, and only 20% of the
waste stream is recycled, it is clear that 30-40% of the waste stream,
recyclables, are wrongly disposed in the trash.

Waste prevention has
likewise had a difficult time in receiving recognition as the highest waste
priority. Although the New York State Solid Waste Management Act of 1988's goal
for waste prevention was 8 to 10%, the State backed away from the waste
prevention goal as well as the recycling goal.†
Waste prevention receives roughly $1 to 2 million annually in the City's
budget for a few small programs aimed mainly at commercial waste
prevention.† By comparison $300 million
is spent for collections, $150 million for export (and increasing at a rapid
rate annually as the Fresh Kills closure date at the end of 2001 nears), and $50
million for recycling in round figures.†

The U.S. waste
stream, when viewed for waste prevention opportunities, consists of roughly 1/3
packaging, 15% durable products (products made to last at least 3 years), 30%
non-durables, plus compostable food and yard waste.[2]† Earlier in the decade the City issued an RFP
to collect durables disposed by residents, but did not follow through with the
program due to lack of response.† But one
of the waste prevention programs, co-sponsored by the Administration, the
Manhattan Borough President's office, and Transportation Alternatives, a
nonprofit New York City-based transit organization, "Recycle a
Bicycle", has been successful in training junior high school students to
repair bicycles in a few pilot programs.†
In the 1999 and 2000 budget cycles the Manhattan Citizens' SWAB
recommended the expansion of this program into other consumer durables, such as
electronics, furniture and appliances, placing trained students in
apprenticeships, which would help reverse the inner-city high unemployment rate
as well as the declining repair industry.

Project Design

The brief descriptions of New
York City's recycling and waste prevention programs point out at least two
areas of research questions:† 1) where
are recyclables most often deposited in the trash, and why, and 2) where and
which types of durable products are left at curbside for disposal.† In order to start answering these questions,
a research project was designed to gather data on the streets of New
York City.†
Three large introductory geology and geography classes at Hunter College
in New York City (320 enrolled) and at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New
Jersey (200 in one class and 300 in another), were introduced to the problems
of waste management and the promise of waste prevention and recycling.† For extra credit they were encouraged to
gather data on the streets of their locality to answer the research questions,
forming a new geographical database of information.† A matrix was designed (Fig. 1) for use by
student volunteers from the classes. †For
each location (unique addresses), the following information was to be
gathered:†

Day

Date

Time

Address (the Rutgers
students were asked for Town and Ward # as well)

Whether the area was
residential, commercial or mixed (for Rutgers: R1=,
Apartment building or dorm; R2=small residential, C= commercial).

The number of garbage bags and
garbage cans left at curbside

Number, description, and condition of durables

Number of bags/cans with recyclable glass.†

The students were instructed to collect the data early in the
morning on garbage collection (not recycling) routes.† Accuracy
and legibility of data was stressed.

Data Collection

Prior to data collection, the students were given a brief lecture and two
pages of instructions (Fig. 2) along with copies of the Matrix, and given a
rationale for the project as well as background on recycling and waste
prevention in New York City, as well as instructions on when and how to gather
the record the data.† Since the data
gathering took place over a few weeks in each case, there was ample opportunity
to answer questions from the students about the data collection procedures. Over
1500 New York City observations
were made; some locations were covered more than one time.† It is estimated that three times this number
of observations were made in New Jersey.

Although the original intention was for the first phase of the project to
be conducted solely in Manhattan, it was soon expanded to all five boroughs at the request of
students.† The same was true for the New
Jersey project.† Most of the data was
gathered in New Brunswick, but a significant amount was gathered in Piscataway,
Highland Park, East Brunswick, North Brunswick and several other cities and
towns in New Jersey. The collection by Hunter students in New York City
occurred in late April and early May 1999, and by Rutgers students in late
November and early December, 1999 in New Brunswick and environs.†

NYC
has been collecting resources such as newspapers, magazines, bottles, and cans
for recycling since 1988.Recycling
conserves natural resources such as metals, some of which are becoming in short
supply, plastic, which is manufactured from oil, glass, which comes from sand,
and paper products, which come from trees.Mining not only depletes natural resources, but also generates
environmental impacts such as air and water pollution.Clear-cutting our forests produce a large number of impacts on the local
biosphere, and on increasing erosion of topsoil and sedimentation of streams.Creating paper, plastic, and most products involves environmental impacts
of air and water pollution.

The
City Council passed a mandatory recycling law, requiring that NYC reach a
recycling rate of 25% by 1994, but the Mayor has never put in sufficient funding
either for recycling education or enforcement, so we only recycle about 19%.Other cities recycle as much as 50%.The more we recycle the less we have to extract minerals and fossil
fuels, and log forests, so we want to maximize our recycling rate.

We
also want to reduce the amount of materials that we use.This is called waste prevention.How can we reduce the amount of materials used?Yesterday I saw a GNC store cashier put not one, not two, but three
shopping bags around someoneís order (it wasnít that heavy!).Meanwhile, I was carrying reusable cloth bags for my purchases.

My
local grocery store estimates they give out 20,000 plastic shopping bags per
week!Multiply that by hundreds of
stores in NYC.And thatís just the
needless bags we use, throw away, and waste.They donít decompose in the landfill and are hard to recycle.Packaging wastes are almost 1/3 of the wastes that we create, there are
many opportunities to reduce packaging waste.

How
else can we reduce waste?We can
repair or refurbish durable products rather than throwing them out.What are durable products?
Commerce Dept. definition:Product
DESIGNED to last more than 3 years.

Sometimes there is absolutely NOTHING wrong with the item; the owner just
doesnít want it anymore.Sometimes,
it needs a small repair, but the owner doesnít want to bother.

Hereís where our
project comes in.

There is no information about how many and what kinds of durable products are
being thrown out and destroyed in the back of Sanitation packer trucks.

Lessons were learned from the
Hunter data collection experience, and were implemented in the New Jersey
phase.† The expansion of data collection
area from Manhattan to include the other boroughs proved to be somewhat
problematic, since the matrix did not request borough information for each
location.† Some of the New York data had
to be discarded as certain addresses are repeated in more than one
borough.† This problem was rectified for
the New Jersey phase, as specific information was requested regarding each
location's town plus either zip code (for non-New Brunswick locations) or
Sanitation Ward number (for New Brunswick data).†

Another improvement was made
regarding the collection of information on the type of location from which each
set of data was collected.† In the New
York phase information on the general building characteristics of the immediate
area were requested (i.e., residential, commercial, and mixed).† For the New Jersey phase, more specific
information on each location was requested (i.e., the size of each building
that generated the waste if in the residential sector, and a commercial
designation if the data location was commercial).†

Even more information is being
sought regarding the population residing at each address, so that comparisons
of data at different addresses can be more meaningful. Since not every location
is the same as the next (i.e., a large apartment building may be right next to a
small brownstone rowhouse), the records of the number of garbage bags and cans
at each location might prove helpful in assessing the relative magnitude of the
durables pile.

The entry of the recyclables
discards data onto the data collection sheets shows that students appeared to
have interpreted the directions in more than one way.†† Garbage is discarded both in black bags and
in garbage cans, and so there were two columns for total garbage bags and
garbage cans seen at each location.† It
was intended that the last column would show both the number of garbage bags
and garbage cans that contained recyclable glass separated by a slash (e.g.,
Bags / Cans), but some students wrote only one figure in this column.† For the New Jersey phase, a slash mark was pre-entered
into each square of the data collection matrix to ensure that two figures would
be entered.

Statistical
and Analytical Design

The simplest presentation of the
data will involve maps depicting locations of data collection vs. locations of
durables discard, and of misallocation of recyclables in the garbage.† Other maps will show disaggregated categories
of durables (e.g., appliances, electronics, furniture).

The categories of data chosen
for collection (the column headings in the matrix) lend themselves to
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) analysis.†
GIS studies can pinpoint hotspots of activity or inactivity, in this
case poor or good recycling behavior, and hot spots of generation of durable
products that are not discarded in more environmentally friendly ways (e.g.,
resold, donated, lent out, refurbished, etc.).††

Other GIS analyses are planned,
for example:

Durables Discards

Income vs. durables discards

Race vs. durables discards

Age vs. durables discards

Building type vs. durables discards

Educational level vs. durables
discards

Cross-tabulations, e.g., high
income and high educational level vs. furniture discards

The same list of GIS analyses is
planned to see if there is any unusual spatial distribution of inappropriate
recyclables discards as well.

Current
Project Status

The New Jersey data are currently in the process of being transcribed
from the paper originals to Excel spreadsheets in preparation for
analysis.† At the same time, local
databases for demographic data are being secured for purposes of GIS analysis.

Conclusions

While it is premature to
speculate about the prevalence or spatial distribution of instances where
durables or recyclable materials are discarded in the trash, some lessons were
learned in the instruction of the data collection volunteers and in the design
of the data collection matrix.† It is
also very important to be as specific as possible to characterize the building
generating the discards.† Smaller
buildings would be expected to generate smaller quantities of discards of all
kinds, and it is incorrect to give the same weight to the data from all
locations.